Sénancour, ÉTIENNE PIVERT DE, author of Obermann, was born at Paris in November 1770. In a sickly and secluded boyhood he read eagerly, especially travels; at fifteen entered for four years the Collège de la Marche; and here devoured Malebranche, Helvétius, and the 18th-century philosophers, losing his faith completely in the process. At nineteen, with the connivance of his mother, he left home to escape the course at Saint Sulpice required by his imperious father, turned his steps to the lake of Geneva, the next year at Fribourg married a young girl who did not long survive, lost his patrimony through the Revolution, but returned to Paris about 1798, and thereafter made a modest living by his pen, eked out with a pension granted by Louis-Philippe on the recommendation of Thiers and Villemain. He died at Saint-Cloud in February 1846, asking that on his grave might be placed these words only: Eternité, deviens mon asile. His fame rests securely on three books: Réveries sur la Nature primitive de l'Homme (1799), Obermann (1804), and Libres Méditations d'un Solitaire Inconnu. In the first book we see the student of Rousseau weighed down by the absorbing dogma of necessity, full of aversion for all human society, returning to his ideal in the patriarchal nomad, the vegetative instinct, and the primordial sensations of man. In Obermann his hero travels in the Valais, next to Fontainebleau, and again to Switzerland, writing his thoughts the while in letters to a friend. Here the atheism and dogmatic fatalism of the Réveries have given place to universal doubt no less overwhelming. Nowhere is the desolating 'maladie du siècle' more effectively expressed than in this book, which, with affinities enough to Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël, is yet completely original in its inwardness, its sincerity, the deli- cate feeling for nature it exhibits, and the melancholy eloquence of many of its passages. 'Though he may be called a sentimental writer,' says Matthew Arnold, 'and though Obermann, a collection of letters from Switzerland treating almost entirely of nature and of the human soul, may be called a work of sentiment, Sénancour has a gravity and severity which distinguish him from all other writers of the sentimental school. The world is with him in his solitude far less than it is with them; of all writers he is the most perfectly isolated and the least attitudinising. His chief work, too, has a value and power of its own, apart from these merits of its author. The stir of all the main forces, by which modern life is and has been impelled, lives in the letters of Obermann; the dissolving agencies of the 18th century, the fiery storm of the French Revolution, the first faint promise and dawn of that new world which our own time is but now more fully bringing to light—all these are to be felt, almost to be touched, there. To me, indeed, it will always seem that the impressiveness of this production can hardly be rated too high.'
Sénancour was neglected in his day, but he has found fit audience in George Sand, Sainte-Beuve, and, amongst ourselves, Matthew Arnold, whose two elegies, In Memory of the Author of Obermann and Obermann Once More, are known to all lovers of English poetry.
See Sainte-Beuve's two essays in Portraits Contemporains, vol. i.; and the Cornhill Magazine, vol. xlv.